Mica Ertegun, glamorous interior designer and philanthropist, dies at 97

After Mr. Ertegun died in 2006 from injuries sustained in a fall backstage at a Rolling Stones concert in Manhattan, his wife continued the couple’s philanthropic activities. In 2015, her $9 million gift created an atrium for Jazz at Lincoln Center. In 2017, her $1.4 million pledge helped restore a substructure beneath the fourth-century Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, a site where, according to Christian traditions, the body of Christ was buried. In recognition of that gift, she was appointed Grand Commander of the Holy Sepulcher by the Patriarch of Jerusalem.

Her gift of $41 million for humanities scholarships at the University of Oxford in 2012 was the largest of its kind in Oxford’s 900 years. In 2017, in recognition of her achievements in philanthropy, education and British-American cultural relations, Queen Elizabeth II appointed her honorary commander of the Order of the British Empire.

“For Ahmet and for me, one of life’s greatest pleasures has been the study of history, music, languages, literature, art and archaeology,” Ms Ertegun said at the time. “I believe it is extremely important to support those things that persist through time and to make the world a more human place.”

Mica Ertegun was born Ioana Maria Banu in Bucharest, Romania on October 21, 1926, the only child of Natalia Gologan and Dr. Gheorghe Banu. Her father, who served in King Carol II’s cabinet in the 1930s, was close to King Michael I during World War II, when Romania was at times allied with Hitler. Amid Allied air raids, Mica, as her German nurse called her, was sent to the family estate.

In January 1948, after the king had been forced to abdicate and her father had been imprisoned by the new communist government, Mica and Stefan Grecianu, an aristocrat fifteen years older than her whom she had married at the age of sixteen, were train that took the royal family into exile. Traveling on stateless refugee passports, the couple arrived in Zurich penniless.

They stayed with friends for a year in the majestic Dolder Grand hotel, overlooking the Swiss Alps. Others paid for their trip to Paris, where Mica got modeling work to support them. Later, more friends lent them money to move to Canada. They settled on a farm on the shore of Lake Ontario, where Mica helped collect, wash and pack the eggs of 5,000 chickens for eight years.